Earth-working machines, such as excavators, continuous miners, and loaders, often include ground engaging work tools that engage with and/or move a variety of earthen materials. The machines include tracked undercarriages that facilitate movement of the machines over ground surfaces, and other moving parts that may engage with the ground surfaces and/or earthen materials. Repeated exposure to hard earthen materials and/or the ground surfaces may cause one or more components of these machines to wear.
Conventional techniques for detecting wear on the machine components include manual measurements of component dimensions, which may be compared against specified dimensions of the components. Such manual measurements are not only time consuming but also can be inaccurate. Inaccurate measurements of component dimensions, in turn, may result in incorrect predictions regarding a remaining life of the component. As a result, the component may either fail too early or may not be worn enough to require replacement or repair when the machine is removed from service for maintenance. Thus, there is a need for accurate measurement of component dimensions on a machine in a work environment to allow for improved component life predictions, which may help reduce a down time associated with repair or replacement of worn out components.
One attempt to provide accurate measurement of component dimensions on a machine is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 9,875,535 that was issued to Finch et al. on Jan. 23, 2018 (“the '535 patent”). In particular, the '535 patent discloses a wear measurement system that includes an imaging device configured to obtain two-dimensional images of a component. The wear measurement system may generate a three-dimensional point cloud representing the component based on the two-dimensional images, and may select at least two reference points appearing in each of a subset of images selected from the two-dimensional images. The wear measurement system may determine locations of the two reference points in the three-dimensional point cloud, and may determine a distance between the locations. The wear measurement system may determine an amount of wear of the component based on the distance.
While the wear measurement system of the '535 patent discloses determining wear of machine components based on images, the wear measurement system may not be completely automatic and may require manual selection (e.g., by an operator) of scale features on an object of a known size (e.g., a tape measure) in several images. Furthermore, the wear measurement system may require manual selection (e.g. by an operator) of reference points in several images. For example, the operator may manually select center points of pins that connect adjacent links of an undercarriage of a machine.
Automating the manual approach to selecting the scale features and the reference points in images is difficult. For example, automatically selecting the scale features on a machine component is very challenging due to lighting, dirt, and customization issues. Even if the scale features could be automatically selected, measurement error scales linearly with a scale error and features on the machine component may not be controlled to a millimeter level during manufacturing.
The measurement platform of the present disclosure solves one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems in the art.